Question

What are some examples of how anastrophe is used in literature?

Answer 1

Hint:
i) It is often used by poets to maintain rhythm or rhyme scheme.
ii) Novel writers use it to create a sense of depth or wisdom to the words being written.

Complete answer:
Anastrophe is a figure of speech in which we change the normal word order of the subject, the verb and the object. For example; in a sentence – “I love dogs”, ‘I’ is the subject, ‘love’ is the verb and ‘dogs’ is the object. So, the word order here is subject-verb-object. In anastrophe, the word order may be changed into object-subject-verb. That means we can change the sentence ‘I love dogs’, to ‘Dogs, I love’. Another example can be, ‘The moon shimmered in the night sky.’ The word order here is subject-verb-adverb. We can change it into an adverb-subject-verb, and the new sentence will be ‘In the night sky, shimmered the moon’.

The English language has a normal or a common word order which is naturally used in all sentences. When anastrophe is used, the sentence stands out or is emphasized due to its unusual word order.
Therefore, we can say that an anastrophe is used to emphasize a word or a phrase by displacing it.

Note:
-Due to its unusual word order, anastrophe is often confused as an incorrect sentence.
-It is an absolutely correct way to use the English language, but only when necessary.
-If anastrophe is used without the intention of emphasis, or is used so excessively in the same text that it loses its emphasis, then it may be considered as a flaw.